Twitter UK strengthens analytics arm
Twitter UK has poached O2’s head of real time research Jake Steadman ahead of a global announcement about what is understood to be the launch of a new advertising product from the social network.
Marketing Week understands Steadman will join Twitter UK as its head of research. He will be tasked to use research to help brands better understand the impact of their Twitter activity on their wider business objectives.
Marketers have long demanded more data from Twitter to prove the value of their ad campaigns on the service and convince them to invest more of their budgets into the site and the site recently made some major changes to its real-time analytics platform. EMarketer estimates Twitter will generate nearly $1bn in ad revenue next year, largely driven by mobile campaigns.
Twitter recently launched its Ads API programme, with the aim of giving marketers more flexibility about how they plan, buy and evaluate campaigns on the site and elsewhere using pre-existing dashboards from the likes of Adobe, Hootsuite, Salesforce, SHIFT and TBG Digital.
It is understood Twitter’s advertising announcement later this week could include a tie-up with another analytics partner, similar to Facebook’s long-running partnerships with Nielsen and comScore.
Twitter is also rumoured to be on the verge of launching a music service.
Steadman joins a raft of recent high profile hires by Twitter UK, such as Chime Communications’ group creative director Will Scougal and Google’s industry head of YouTube and display Dara Nasr.
He joined O2 in 2012 as senior brand and social media insights manager and was promoted to become head of real time research in 2012. In that role he was responsible for social media monitoring and insights, complaints reporting and analysis and being the voice of employee insights.
O2 will not be directly replacing Steadman but his team and roles will move under Matt Taylor who will become its head of social insight as part of the business intelligence function of its consumer and marketing directorate